rofl. this is great.
This is why I go the extra mile to keep iot out of my life. Especially in cars , which is getting hard, but I figure my future cars I’ll likely retrofit something old. Newest I’ll tolerate is 2014, with no touchscreen.
My car is probably going to die soon and I’m going to have trouble replacing it with something that actually has physical controls, doesn’t have a massive annoying touch screen, doesn’t have LED headlights set blinds everybody driving towards me or walking their dogs, isn’t a compact crossover bloated to the size of an SUV from 20 years ago, and can fit 8 ft length of raw material in it.
Or rather I’m going to have trouble replacing it with something that I like for a decent price that isn’t too old and isn’t a van. Not necessarily because vans suck, vans are great. But the good ones are expensive, even used
In complete agreement. I hate crossovers so much.
Have you looked at this wagons or Volvo wagons ? Or just a good old tacoma or tundra long box ?
Not many wagons left. Will probably end up looking at Volvos. Hopefully more reliable than Subaru, and they’re actually shaped like wagons.
Was looking at old Rangers/B2000s for a while, but it doesn’t make any sense. And I know Tacomas are out of budget lol
Right, and subaru stupidly quit making the wrx wagon in 2014, no idea why. There’s also the appeal of early 2000s gm, dirt cheap and easy to fix. Like an 03 Tahoe. Just not good on gas. You can find some of those in an I5 though which is cool.
Yea I’m not using anything that requires an app. If there’s an app I can host myself I might use it but I won’t rely on anything that can’t be controlled manually. The place I rent now has ceiling fans that are controlled by remote and I fucking hate them. It uses a shitty up/down button that has a horrendous delay or both the light and fan. It’s all the frustration of using a pull chain with no improvement. I can’t even figure out how to get it to switch directions for winter.
“Ok, so what you can see in the logs?”
“Sweetcorn.”
Didn’t ingest any, but it’s still there somehow
Must be a kernel issue
Anything in my house smarter than the IKEA remote control light switch gets crushed with a hammer.
Can you play DOOM on the light switch?
Same, the only thing talkings to the internet are my reverse proxy and the security cameras (only when viewing them from outside the local network, quite like what reolink does there)
Friends hate this one simple trick!
Reminder: never go have pancakes at wise_pancake’s house.
I mean, you could just use smarter stuff that’s open source and has local API, or do what I do and build your own devices where you can ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Stuff like openWRT routers get a pass.
If it has a local host API I would use it because it never has to connect to the internet.
People also just need to be more selective about where and how they automate.
For example, I wanted my coffee to automatically start in the morning. So instead of buying a “smart” coffee maker, I bought the dumbest possible one and a smart switch. Now, no matter what happens with that switch, the worst that can happen is I have to manually hit a button to get coffee.
I wish I was this smart. We really want to do a smart light show using Xlights but every time I try to learn it I feel so frankly dumb.
Yes, I don’t hate the idea of smart-ish devices, if they’re not cloud-dependent in any way and have some kind of manual override.
It’s kind of painful to have a kitchen full of devices each implementing their own half-assed OSs separately, or even more than once in one device.
I have a wifi-enabled garage door opener whose manufacturer discontinued the Google Home connection for so that you have to use their app and see their Amazon or Walmart ads. I also have a wifi-enabled alarm system whose manufacturer apparently doesn’t care about Matter integration or whatever. So leaving the house in my car requires the use of two different apps (three if I also need to turn off lights).
In actuality I just use the physical buttons. But there was a time that I had a beautiful dream of getting a smart lock and setting my house up to lock the doors, close the garage door, and arm the alarm when I pushed a button in the car–and, more importantly, undo all of those things in reverse when I got home.
with Home Assistant it doesn’t matter if your device adds a Google Home connection, Alexa, Apple Home, etc. Exactly what ‘smart homes’ should be.
I need to get on that, I guess.
Even there though, what is the actual point of a phone app controlled smart toilet, even if you open sourced the whole thing? Unlocking one’s phone and tapping the app icon, and then presumably a button on the app, is going to take more time than one press of a lever that one is right next to anyway, and the latter doesn’t present as many points of failure.
Well if you read the product description it was to allow AI Bidet control. However they had not received funding for AI so it was outsourced to a team of laborers in India using cameras and joysticks.
It also logged the consistency, frequency and matter samples from all BMs so you could make informed dedication opinions.
Spoiler
/s
informed dedication opinions.
Hmmmmm
Damn was supposed to be defecation autocorrect got me.
Oooohhhhh, that makes sense.
I heard they sold a license for the camera feed and controls access to EA for their next pay-to-play iOS game. The shareholders are really excited for this synergy.
I asked for AI Biden control smh
I have no interest in one, but playing devil’s advocate, some might consider it more sanitary since you don’t have to touch the toilet to flush and have the choice of not being near it, hopefully avoiding any spray.
Also, if your guests use the restroom, you can startle them at any time.
Yeah, wouldn’t want to get bacteria on your hands a few seconds before washing your hands.
Yeah I’d much rather spread poo particles all over my smartphone instead
How do the guests flush the toilet without the app? They have to ask you?
Of course. My roof, my water, my rules! /s
That occurred to me while writing my comment, as well, and I don’t like the implications.
I would imagine they have to ask you, yes. If the toilet can be flushed without authentication, they’d probably still have to ask you how.
more sanitary
Foot pedal flush really needs to become a thing.
Wait, why isn’t it? There’s been so many weird flush designs over the years.
Designing foot-operated things tends to fly in the face of modern accessibility standards. Wheelchair users already have enough problems using public toilets.
They can still have both. A foot pedal for those who want it, a standard handle for those who don’t or can’t. In fact, retrofitting existing handle-flush toilets to add foot pedals could make a lot of sense.
It is in campers, lol.
Probably just the extra cost of linkage and maybe risk of tripping over it
I assume lack of demand. In your own home, you’d be keeping the handle clean, and public washrooms often use the touchless sensor types.
Ok maybe the flushing part is a bit overkill and mostly a joke, but a toilet that can deliver notifications like if it’s clogged for example before you use it and make it worse would have fantastic utility IMO
I guess, but I’ve never heard of a toilet clogging before it’s used.
There’s other better examples, though. Smart thermostats get plenty of use from the people I know with them. A fridge that tracks how long stuff has been inside would be dope. Smart lights have uses.
Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.
Ask me how I know.
Well, I suppose it is the kind of system where a lot of weird non-deterministic things can happen.
What kind of sensor are we thinking of here? Optical? I know it’s a real issue to find something that doesn’t foul or misread even in the simpler application of an RV septic tank.
I wonder if you could just put a window in the U-bend for manual inspection. It’s supposed to be full of “clean” water most of the time anyway.
Yeah, not to mention, adding any sort of electronic components to the thing would be dicey at best. A lot of bathrooms don’t even have power outlets anywhere near the toilet.
I’d prefer some sort of pressure-activated valve or something, but this is an engineering challenge that’s beyond my meager skills.
This makes zero sense. If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl. Why the would anyone need a notification for that?
The ONLY utility that I could see here is if the notification logged who did the clogging so you could give them shit.
Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.
Ask me how I know.
That said, this could almost certainly be better-solved in other ways. Maybe by preventing the tank from refilling if there’s still something in the u-bend (then you’d know it needed attention because there’d be no water in it)?
How do you know?
- We don’t know that the toilet has this sensing capability.
- If it does, the actual fix is the same as if it were a regular toilet.
This just isn’t an issue that needs technology as a solution.
125% agreed. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.” I think there’s potentially an engineering solution–a fluid dynamics engineering solution–but definitely not an app.
A little display or indicator light somewhere on the toilet itself would be better than connecting it to some IOT app
One word.
Toddlers
But in this scenario don’t the toddlers need phones? Wait do toddlers all have phones now?
How’s your family doing?
They were bonked with a hammer until they were below the proper “smart” threshold.
You sent this message by manually sending radio messages, I presume?
No, it’s one of the few use cases of emacs.
Have you tried our new Hammr and associated app? The smart tool that can analyze your work! Become more efficient! Compete with friends! Earn achievements! Track your heart rate! Now with several different modes…
Is that the new ifixit one?
And this is why KNX and Home Assistant are a good idea.
Why would you ever get a toilet that requires anything but the laws of physics to operate?
My new eFirepit is causing my family to die of hypothermia.
I mean… Electronics and the Internet are also following the laws of physics. But I get what you mean, levers should be the only activation, and gravity should be the only requirement.
That being said, electronics in our devices do tend to reduce the amount of water and power that appliances use. Dumb devices are extremely inefficient, even though there are fewer points of failure.
It sucks that a 1950’s fridge can still function just fine today, but it also is a bigger strain on the power grid, and a leak in the refrigerant would destroy the ozone.
> That being said, electronics in our devices do tend to reduce the amount of water and power that appliances use. Dumb devices are extremely inefficient, even though there are fewer points of failure.
I fail to see how electronics in these (unpowered) devices in any way reduce the amount of power that they use.
In theory you could have a system that monitors input and then uses a precise amount of water to vacate the bowl.
Oh sick, a toilet with bowl cameras
I figure a scale would probably work better.
I think that was just a general statement regarding old devices, since they brought up a 1950s refrigerator as an example of a powered “dumb” device
You’re already @ the mf toilet too, or the sink. what is even the purported purpose of remotely activating something you have to stand there to use?
Uh, a bidet?
I can see some purpose in having a ‘smart’ toilet for monitoring health. Your pee and poo can have some value in seeing if there anything that needs to be dealt with medically. But even that is difficult to do. For one thing, it must still function ad a toilet first before anything. Meaning it uses the simple mechanical flushing and refilling and stopping when it is sufficiently full.
However for this the analysis and storage of data must be 100% at the user’s control. If they want it gone. It is gone. Irrecoverable. Any update must be done via USB or other connection. No wifi or internet.
And even then the analysis can be off for obvious reasons. People need to scrub their toilets and some keep it clean by having one of those pucks in the tank that sanitize the water. All of these can interfere with any results out of a medical setting.
Yeah but if they let users control the data then how are they supposed to sell it to insurance companies to boost their value to VCs???
If it doesn’t work well without the Internet, it’s a bad investment. Features that require the Internet degrading a bit is one thing, but if a toilet or toaster can’t do its basic job offline, it was ewaste the second it rolled off the factory line.
Same goes for games BTW
Fuck online requirements
Recently noticed how many of my “offline single player” games did not actually work offline, after moving and being without internet for a while.
To anyone reading this, try unplugging your PC and check what your options actually are. I was really disappointed about not being “allowed” to play Red Dead.
Curiously, the pirate version works fine offline.
It’s almost as if being online is not an actual technical requirement…
And yet we will still fail the target for stopkillinggames.com People just don’t care.
Yeah I posted about that shit a long time ago, I knew people weren’t gonna respond, we all saw the numbers. It had the momentum of fucking syrup.
They deserve to get their games deleted. I hope they get real fucking mad about it. Impotent rage, just completely red faced, making little comments and posts here and there pleading and wilding out, writing nasty shit, getting a fucking aneurysm.
Then giving up and moving on, accepting how powerless they are, despite not really being powerless at all. That’s the real tragedy of it.
Except if the game is designed to be multiplayer-only, but even then we should be able to set up our own servers. If the original Half Life could do it in 1998 then why can’t we do it now?
If a multiplayer-only game turns down official servers, and you can’t self-host within the game, they should owe players a separate server binary they can run, or a partial refund for breaking the game. It should not be hard, especially if it’s a known constraint when they develop the game.
How TF you expect that to work with MMO style games that may have significantly complex server infrastructure & deployment environments?
The one MMO I’ve meaningfully played, RuneScape, has open source replicas of its server from different points in time, that the community has made. I’m not gonna pretend it’s zero work, but a developer with the source code absolutely could do these things. It also doesn’t need to be perfectly compatible with the original one, you can replace a complex DB backend with something standard and less performant. Only runs on Linux, or MS Server 2k8? The community of people who care will figure it out.
Maybe a source code release would be preferable in this kind of option. EA just did this with a few Command and Conquer games.
Source Code release could be complicated, especially for games that aren’t 30 years old because the devs don’t start over from scratch every time so there would still be an enormous amount of proprietary code in it.
Itd be cool (and as impractical as it is, I believe all code should be open sources) but not really feasible
that’s the company’s problem. They made it too complicated.
No it isn’t this is a crazy ignorant comment that just hand waves the problem I presented away because it’s not convenient enough for your stance.
If you’re going to comment don’t comment in bad faith, that’s not the kind of discussions we need on lemmy.
The problem begets the solution. And damn near every modern MMO has a significant set of challenges that they have built technological solutions for which drive more complicated infrastructure.
it’s a bit of a straw man from your side to act like the discussion is about multiplayer when we are discussing about single player campaign based RPGs or about multiplayer when the company deliberately shuts it down in favour of a new version that just milks players for more money; or about toasters that definitely don’t need internet connection to function.
or toaster can’t do its basic job offline
pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster
Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene
The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.
“Come on.” Brrt.
She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.
Brrt.
Long before she got to that point, she’d grown certain that it was a lost cause. But these were the steps that you took when the electronics stopped working, so you could call the 800 number and say, “I’ve turned it off and on, I’ve unplugged it, I’ve reset it to factory defaults and…”
There was a touchscreen option on the toaster to call support, but that wasn’t working, so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it. It rang seventeen times and disconnected. She heaved a sigh. Another one bites the dust.
The toaster wasn’t the first appliance to go (that honor went to the dishwasher, which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when Disher went under), but it was the last straw. She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?
Just to be sure, she asked the fridge for headlines about Boulangism, and there it was, their cloud had burst in the night. Socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread. She prodded a headline and learned that Boulangism had been a ghost ship for at least six months because that’s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data—passwords, log-ins, ordering and billing details—had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption. There were ransom notes in the database, records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of Boulangism’s shitty data handling. No one had even seen them.
Boulangism’s share price had declined by 98 percent over the past year. There might not even be a Boulangism anymore. When Salima had pictured Boulangism, she’d imagined the French bakery that was on the toaster’s idle-screen, dusted with flour, woodblock tables with serried ranks of crusty loaves. She’d pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road. She’d pictured gas lamps.
The article had a street-view shot of Boulangism’s headquarters, a four-story office block in Pune, near Mumbai, walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance.
The Boulangism cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering Salima’s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast had come from an authorized Boulangism baker, which it had. In the absence of a reply, the paranoid little gadget would assume that Salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without Salima and millions of other Boulangism stakeholders (never just “customers”) waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters.
And what of the Boulangism baker-partners? They’d done the right thing, signing up for a Boulangism license, subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in Boulangism’s precision-engineered appliances, with crumb and porosity in perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads. These valued partners deserved to have their commitment to excellence honored, not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread.
Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.
She tried to search her fridge for “boulangism hacks” and “boulangism unlock codes” but appliances stuck together. KitchenAid’s network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky “no results” screens even though Salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread.
She had to leave for work in half an hour, and she hadn’t even showered yet, but goddamnit, first the dishwasher and now the toaster. She found her laptop, used when she’d gotten it, now barely functional. Its battery was long dead and she had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a charger cable, but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates, she was able to run the darknet browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling.
She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.
The dishwasher was next. Once Salima had found the right forum, it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing. After all, she………… 😉
Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters
Cory Doctorow’s book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here’s an excerpt.
She could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast—over a candle?
Oven refusing to work too? Broil that bread, and put two bullets in the toaster for insubordination and dereliction of duty.
This is great though, gonna have to read the whole thing and/or other book!
Thank you!
I believe I am hooked and will have to get this now. Dammit. I already have a back log and swore off getting anymore, and this just waltzes in front of my face.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
Douglas Adams
Adams’s law.
Douglas Adams was a huge fan of Apple.
The difference between an IT person and a tech enthusiast
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Security technicians: takes a deep swig of whiskey I wish I had been born in the neolithic.
Im studying the security stuff. The more you think about it, the more paranoid you become until you notice that your level of paranoia is far too high and try to ignore things.
Firmwares everywhere are definitely spying on us. Or at leasty they could, and we wouldn’t really know it.
Why would a programmer own a printer? I almost never print anything and when I need to I just go to a library.
Shipping labels are about all I use mine for.
“Routers using OpenWRT”
Every time I research this, it seems like nothing I can reasonably acquire can run it. Especially any WiFi 6 / AX devices. It’s infuriating.
Edit: Not the fault of OpenWRT, but how stupidly locked down everything is manufactured by design anymore.
You can get a glinet router. They have a WiFi 7 device coming out shortly as well.
Laughs nervously in self-hosted
What’s “Skynet” mode? Lol.
They have knives, and you didn’t put them there
Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.
Footage from a robot in skynet mode:
!it’s from the movie Runaway 1984!<
“Dumb” is the new “smart”.
The fact that everything is controlled through “The Cloud” and some godforsaken subscription service is so terribly sad, funny, and horrifying at the same time. We’ve literally found every conceivable way to gather and sell people’s data while simultaneously milking them out of every last cent with the whole FOMO mentality driven through every piece of hardware and software now sold. It is just absolutely fucking preposterous. We’re living in a virtual hellscape that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
People have other options, but the easiest option is always going to be to let someone else do it. Their price is, almost always, your private data and a subscription.
Or, you can DIY and self-host. Home Assistant is free and supports many different standards so you can use just about any hardware. It runs on your own hardware and doesn’t report to anyone unless you tell it to. It requires more effort than swiping a credit card and installing an app, however.
Who buys a toilet you can only flush with an app??
sometime who buys a toilet and then finds out afterwards that they were sold a toilet that only flushes with an app
This. SO many devices, especially networking stuff. It seems like they should just do their thing after plugging in and setting a few settings. “It’s so EZ!” says the box.
Nope, “scan this code to get this app, make an account, agree to all the things, register for spam…”
It’s disgusting.
What do house guests do?
“Let me know when you’re done and I can flush the toilet though the app.”
Or
“Download this app to flush the toilet once at my house.”
the host just watches them through the built in camera and the house guest thinks it flushes automatically :)
“Ok, Richard, I’m done.”
“Yeah, I got the notification actually. Heavy dinner last night?”
“What the actual fuck, Richard?”
I think it was voice activated.
The app was probably for additional stuff.
I would hope just motion activated. I really don’t want to have to yell at my toilet either.
“Oh, SHIT!”
flush
Poker night: Read 'em and weep boys, straight flush!
From the other room: *flushing noises*
I hear this in the voice of Lindsay Lohan. Though I don’t think there was a toilet flush at that point in that movie!
Yeah. I’m absolutely opposed to unnecessarily “smart” devices.
I have a strong aversion to voice activated anything. Smartphones have had voice assistant’s since forever but whenever I’ve tried it I just find it to be a clunky awkward imprecise user interface.
Why do something in a few clicks when 10 minutes of miscommunication will do?
In-house toilet facilities are more or less a solved problem. These idiots un-solved it.
And yet I hear dumbshits bragging all time about how alexa controls my (insert thing that definitely does not need automation here).
These sort of people never think beyond tomorrow and it shows.
Okay, I get the idea of smart AC for example - be elsewhere, turn it on remotely so that it’s comfortable when you get home. Fine. But a toilet? You are physically present there, you can push a button to flush. Or are you telling me that you’re shitting remotely now too?
Hands free means you don’t have to touch the handle with dirty hands, but you can do that with a motion sensor too.
Personally I would much rather touch my phone with my dirty hands than a toilet handle
We’ve been ready for pedal activated toilets for decades now
you’re shitting remotely now too?
Do we tell them about the remote shit technology that just landed from Uranus?
It’s not that great anyway. Your local toilet will surreptitiously grab and analyze your poop, dispose of it so you don’t need to flush, and have the remote toilet extrude an identical copy someone else has to flush.
Wait, so you’re not subscribed to shitme™? For a low monthly subscription they send you a sealed, self-addressed and postage-paid container to deposit your feces in, it gets sent to a sorting facility and distributed via drones or delivery drivers directly to your home toilet, where the feces are flushed in the privacy and safety of your own home! The peace-of-mind alone is worth the $39.98 a month. Up until now, the only challenge has been flushing the toilet while you’re still at the office, this way you NEVER have to go home!
Shit like a world leader